P. Bambazek, I. Groher: Integrating the Sustainability Awareness Framework in Undergraduate Software Engineering Education, 30th International Working Conference on Requirement Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ 2024), Education and Training Track, Winterthur, Switzerland, April 8-11, 2024.
In recent years, sustainability has emerged as an important concern in requirements engineering. The Sustainability Awareness Framework, the leading approach in this area, offers practical support for practitioners to identify the potential sustainability impacts of software systems. Despite its relevance, a critical question remains unanswered: how can we effectively enhance sustainability awareness among students and integrate it into software engineering education? In this paper, we present early results of an ongoing undergraduate practical software engineering course in which we integrated the Sustainability Awareness Framework. We report on how students performed in identifying sustainability effects of a new software system for a hypothetical company. Our primary contribution is a comprehensive guideline for embedding the Sustainability Awareness Framework in university-level courses. Moreover, our findings reveal that students, even without prior related knowledge, can identify significant sustainability aspects, supporting the framework’s educational value and accessibility.